IN 1996, the Rev. Dr. Jim Burns and his family moved from Lexington, Ky., to Carnegie Hill. He remembers the day clearly. As their moving van maneuvered through a narrow side street, it backed into a tree.

''Within half an hour, a representative of the Carnegie Hill Neighbors came by to welcome us and wanted to know if the moving company would pay for the tree,'' said Dr. Burns, who is the rector at the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest, at Fifth Avenue and 90th Street. ''Coming from Kentucky to New York City, we didn't know what to expect, but right away, we had the feeling of being in a small town.''

With its quiet, tree-lined streets and meticulously restored 19th-century town houses, Carnegie Hill does exude just that sort of atmosphere. In the drugstores, florists and shoe-repair shops along Madison and Lexington Avenues, residents are greeted on a first-name basis. At Christmastime, neighbors gather in front of the Brick Church on Park Avenue to sing carols and celebrate the lighting of the trees on the avenue.

''We used to joke that it took a couple hours to run a quick errand in the neighborhood because we see so many people we know just walking a block or two,'' Lenny Golay said. She and her husband, Ray Sherman, opened the Corner Bookstore at Madison Avenue and 93rd Street in 1975.

Carnegie Hill Neighbors, a nonprofit community group, is devoted to preserving the village environment. It makes sure the neighborhood's sidewalks are clear of litter, plants flowers in the Park Avenue medians and maintains the street trees, which are pruned and fertilized by a crew of volunteers. The group pays two uniformed guards to patrol the neighborhood at night.

But Carnegie Hill is an urban village like few others. This slice of genteel affluence, bounded roughly by 86th and 98th Streets and Fifth and Third Avenues, is home to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the International Center for Photography and the Jewish Museum, and it is steps away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Its village green is the 840-acre Central Park, where mornings and evenings the 1.6-mile track around the Reservoir is filled with joggers.

Amid the parents pushing oversized strollers with one hand and holding cell phones in the other, neighborhood residents like Paul Newman, Bette Midler, Woody Allen and Kevin Kline can be seen strolling past the uniformed doormen along Park and Fifth Avenues.

The celebrity presence has been felt in the current controversy over a planned building. When the Tamarkin Company announced plans last spring to build a 16-story luxury apartment tower above the one-story Citibank building at 91st Street and Madison Avenue, many residents were upset. Though the proposed building is just a couple of stories higher than many prewar structures on the avenues a block in either direction, some residents contend that the new building will destroy the character of the surrounding low-rise blocks.

Since the site is in a historic district, the Landmarks Preservation Commission held hearings last month to consider the building plan. Woody Allen, whose garden behind his town house would likely be cast in shadow by the new building, presented the commission with a short video on the neighborhood's history. The commission's decision could come as early as next month.

With prices for apartments and town houses rocketing well into the millions, Carnegie Hill is one of the city's most expensive communities, said Steven L. James, an executive vice president of the Douglas Elliman residential brokerage company.

In the elegant prewar co-op buildings along Park and Fifth Avenues, two- and three-bedroom apartments sell for $950,000 to $2 million or more, said Arthur Samuels Jr., a broker at Coldwell Banker Hunt Kennedy Realtors and a Carnegie Hill resident since 1973. One-bedrooms throughout the neighborhood range from $360,000 to $400,000, he said, and rents for one- and two-bedroom apartments run from $2,000 to over $3,000 a month.

''It's gotten much much more expensive here in the last few years,'' Mr. Samuels said. ''There are so many families looking for larger apartments that we just can't fill the demand.''

Four- and five-story town houses, which 10 years ago could be bought for less than $1 million, are now in the $3-to-$4-million range, said Jed Garfield, a principal in Garfield Realtors. ''Even at those prices, they are selling pretty quickly,'' he said. On 91st Street, a four-story brownstone built in the 1880's recently sold after less than six months on the market for almost $3 million.

IN the last 10 years, many of the storefronts on Madison Avenue have been taken over by upscale restaurants and boutiques selling children's clothes, toys and shoes. Although the neighborhood has largely avoided the flood of chain stores that have moved into other parts of the city, the shoe-repair shops, dry cleaners and specialty shops once found on Madison Avenue have moved to Lexington Avenue, where commercial rents are slightly less.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Barbara Kafka, the cookbook author, moved to Carnegie Hill when she was a child in 1948 and has lived in a brownstone on 92nd Street for the last 36 years. ''When I first came here, there was nothing but a greasy spoon across the street,'' she said. ''That certainly has changed. As the yuppie kids have yuppie puppies, they are moving their families up here.''

Wealthy young families are attracted by the area's private schools, including Convent of the Sacred Heart, Dalton, Nightingale-Bamford, Spence, St. Bernard's and St. David's, where tuitions can run to $20,000 a year.

The Hunter College Elementary and High Schools, at 94th Street and Park Avenue, require entrance exams. The schools, administered by the college, are open to gifted students who live anywhere in Manhattan.

Public schools serving Carnegie Hill include the highly regarded P.S. 6 on 81st Street, with kindergarten through the fifth grade. More than 98 percent of the third graders at P.S. 6 were reading at or above grade level in the last school year. P.S. 198, at 1700 Third Avenue (96th Street), also offers kindergarten through the fifth grade. It has established a partnership with the Seagram Corporation, and Seagram employees -- 350 during the school year -- provide tutoring, help set up the student-run school store, read to kindergarteners and sponsor a career fair for fifth graders. Last year, nearly 74 percent of the school's third graders read at or above grade level.

Despite its air of stately elegance, urban realities do impinge on the neighborhood, and Carnegie Hill's churches and synagogues sponsor volunteer programs for the needy. St. Thomas More, a Roman Catholic church on 89th Street, sponsors an annual clothing drive, and it, along with the Brick Church and other groups, contributes to the Yorkville Common Pantry, which provides food for the poor. The Church of the Heavenly Rest runs a homeless shelter on weeknights and houses the oldest Alcoholics Anonymous group in the city.

About 40 area residents work as volunteer tutors and raise money to assist P.S. 169 on 88th Street, a school for children with emotional problems and learning disabilities. The school has about 120 students, ages 8 to 14, from all five boroughs.

In the 17th century, the rocky hills around 98th Street and Park Avenue were the site of a Weckquaesgek Indian village. In the 18th century, as Dutch and later English settlers moved in, the Indians were driven out, and a fortified village called New Haarlem was established. But much of the land that is now Carnegie Hill remained unsettled well into the 19th century.

According to ''Carnegie Hill: An Architectural Guide,'' published by the neighbors' group in 1989, some of the earliest residents were Irish immigrants who ''established squatter settlements along the hilly wilderness of Fourth Avenue,'' now Park Avenue. By the Civil War, several breweries and piano factories had appeared along the tracks of the New York & Harlem Railroad. Nearby were two- and three-story frame houses, and four from the 1800's remain standing on 92nd and 93rd Streets.

In the late 19th century, brownstone development was fueled by the completion of Central Park and of the elevated train lines on Second and Third Avenues.

The neighborhood acquired its name, and its cachet, when Andrew Carnegie built what he called ''the most modest, plainest and most roomy house in New York'' at the corner of 91st Street and Fifth Avenue. The 64-room brick and limestone mansion, completed in 1902, included an indoor gymnasium and the latest technologies in indoor plumbing, heating and cooling. It is now the Cooper-Hewitt museum.

Carnegie's arrival made the neighborhood one of the most sought-after in Manhattan. Narrow brownstones gave way to elegant town houses as the city's elite moved in. Many of those houses remain today, part of the historic district that covers, roughly, the center and western half of of Carnegie Hill.

''If you look out the window at all the nearby buildings, it might not seem like much has changed,'' said Ms. Kafka, the author. ''And it's a very pleasant way of life. I walk my dog in the park, I feel safe at night, and I like the fact that the buildings are low so you have some light, which is unusual in the city.''

Correction: March 26, 2000

An article last Sunday about living in Carnegie Hill misstated the residency requirements for Hunter College High School. Admission to the high school is open, by examination, to residents of all boroughs. It is the school's elementary division that is restricted to Manhattan residents.

We are continually improving the quality of our text archives. Please send feedback, error reports,
and suggestions to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

A version of this article appears in print on March 19, 2000, on Page 11011005 of the National edition with the headline: If You're Thinking of Living In/Carnegie Hill; Small-Town Feeling, Big-City Prices. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe